Recent trends have shown that there are more and more applications, or apps, created to fulfill users' tasks. Many of these apps are available at online locations, such as retail websites, in order to offer users an effortless app-shopping experience that may be customized for devices and/or scenarios. For example, various platforms (e.g., Apple®, Android®, and Microsoft®) have had exponential growth in their respective app stores and currently offer over 500,000 aggregate apps for their respective mobile devices. One such exemplary web-centric application is the Yelp® app—the counterpart application to the www.yelp.com website—that is customized to be installed on a variety of mobile devices.
Yet, along with this ever-expanding multitude of apps, there exists a discoverability problem. That is, popular or relevant applications are often hard to discover via online searches or other contexts where an app would prove useful. This discoverability problem stems from the standard search protocol of conventional search engines, which surface mainly websites, cards, and answers. This is true for both desktop and mobile devices.
With regard to mobile devices, there exist two primary user-initiated activities that have recently become predominate: placing calls and interacting with applications. Yet, these two activities are maintained separately and do not overlap with each other to enable new scenarios or new experience for the user. For instance, business-related incoming and outgoing calls are segregated from the user's quest for information (e.g., services and/or products) related to the business. By way of example, a user may be discussing a deal with a particular company, yet, the user is unable to track transactions or confirm a reservation with the business.
There exist applications with functionalities that would likely enhance the quality of most ongoing conversations, but these applications are undiscoverable during the course of those conversations. In one example, in the case of an outgoing call placed to book a rental car, there is presently no way for a user to browse available car models or get confirmation and pickup details if a reservation is made when the user is on the outgoing call. In another example, in the case of an incoming call received from an airline operator, there is presently no way for a user to track the status of a flight while conducting the incoming call, without the user manually performing a separate online search for the appropriate airline and filtering the search results for the appropriate flight.
Further, there are frequent times when it is easier for parties of a call to interact with the visual information rather than using voice. For example, when a user is picking a seat on a flight while talking with an airline operator, the typical methods of describing the positions of the available seats, selecting one or more of those seats, and writing down the selections prove to be much less efficient than trading visual information while talking. As such, embodiments of the present invention introduce technology for discovering apps relevant to a phone number of an incoming, outgoing, and/or ongoing call and allowing parties to the call to establish a connection over the app during the course of the call.